Shitty/short/pithy/petty answer: I would have also accepted a “You are entirely correct and I bow to your obviously enormous and also weirdly sexy brain, Mando.” ;-)
Well, “What makes games work?” and “What makes games work for Tom Chick?” are very different questions (and neither goes so far as, to paraphrase, “Is it actually a game?”). As I noted to Bob later on in the thread, it might well be a game you don’t care for, and that’s super okay! I can’t stand Dark Souls and its various spawn, but can also happily acknowledge that they’re well-designed games for their target audience, and that they’ve brought millions a great deal of happiness and enjoyment. They’re definitely games, even if they’re precisely the kind of games I lose interest in all of about six seconds in.
Well, jeeze, just say that next time instead of leveling a cruel and thoughtless accusation at my primary digital source of dopamine for the worst year of my life :P
Which is probably a good summary of my personal opinion of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, for what it’s worth!
Man, who could have predicted that saying “Because it’s fun!” to Tom Chick would get his dander up! Almost like the initial answer was deliberately trolling. . . but no, certainly not Armando “Serious as a Heart Attack” Penblade!
For what it’s worth, I think dictionary-defintion-of-game is about the last interesting possible way to examine a game. All it likely leads to are “As you can see, the chicken is clearly a man!” style, as you put it, pedantry. No definition of anything like a reasonable length is fully immune to bullshit counter-examples and similar nonsense.
On the other hand, outside of this thread and one other where it was argued in the last couple of years on these boards somewhere, I have to admit that across my entire life, I’d given exactly 0 thought to the question of “What is a game?” in my life. It always struck me as one of those self-evident things, like Potter Stewart’s proverbial pornography. The nearest I’ve come is snickering at BECMI-idolater TTRPG grognards decrying the new generation of indie storygames as “fake RPGs,” just because they lacked some defining-in-the-grognards’-eyes characteristics, like stats, or dice, or character sheets, or monsters. And, obviously, those people are silly and stuck in the past, so not worth thinking about their arguments much :)
So, to help guide an answer to the originally posed remark, I doodled around for a bit on other internet discussions around the topic. Pure dictionary definitions were obnoxiously vague, while comparisons against similar-but-vitally-different entertainment categories seemed to establish more measureable guidelines for game-defining.
That said, amusingly enough, of “Provides goals,” “Provides restrictions,” and “Provides an ending condition,” the only one I particularly need to enjoy a game–whatever the hell that might be–is the first. Prior Crossings of the Animals didn’t appeal to me precisely because they were so un-guided. The core loops of ACNH are a little different thanks to the crafting focus, but the main game is still there, intact. The introduction of those little daily goals and the big sprawling achievement board took the latest installment from “neat, but boring” to “digital cocaine” for me, at least.
And if we canonize the implied “…in my opinion” after each of your assessments, I’m fully onboard. Hell, I think I’d even share it sometimes; ACNH’s designers seemed bullheadedly determined to introducing as much annoyance between me and fun as possible at some points (holy fuckin’ goddamn is the crafting interface monumentally horrible).
At its heart, though, it’s an easygoing, laid back, saccharine, pastoral game/experience that isn’t going to ask much of you in terms of dexterity, strategy, or deeper thought, but it is going to positively shower you in encouragement, cuteness, and a continuous stream of minor but effusive praise. It’s The Great British Baking Show or Takenoko or a weirdly good brand of frozen chocolate chip pancakes. And that is awesome. For me :)
